Industrial Zone - An essential district for all cities?

[Brown]

So as I get better at the game I am now competing against the Deity AI and I feel that in order to compete with the AI at the highest difficulty, building an industrial zone in all cities is essential. What do you think?

[awase149]

As your number of cities grow, I don't think it's necessary to have an Industrial Zone in each. Of course you need the production in your main cities, but the later cities can emphasize other needs such as commercial, science and military. Also, you now have to be aware of the pollution and carbon caused by too many power plants. Clean power technologies come later in the game.

[Prometheus]

I think you better add Diety to the title. Far too many people answer the title and don't read the post. You risk getting a lot of advice that isn't suitable.

[Aieonae]

Actually powerplants only account for 2/3 the issue, there are still the oil consumption of unit, railroad construction...

As oong are there are sucy consumption, you will see the efrect in the long run.

[Gentlest Giant]

No. It's a "must" to have factories for the regional buffs but they are not required in every city. Production is great but it's pretty hard to get return on investment on a industrial district with just a +2 adjacency bonus.

That said, I'm not sure how much has changed with the power plants.

[Exemplar]

You have to remember on immortal or deity you don't have a lot of time to just spend dozens of turns building all these industrial zones. You have a limited number of turns before an AI beats you one way or another (unless you've made settings otherwise, but let's say you didn't).

So that means even though it's great you might get 4 or 5 (adjacency plus workshop) extra production, think of how much production you had to use to make that, and think how much farther in the future you really have to capitalize on that 4 or 5. You, too, will come to the conclusion that, yes, it's important to have the factories in select cities, but your production, however low it may be in certain cities, is better spent in other ways.

[Salma Hayek]

Industrial zones are almost always good to have (GPP are a thing for instance) but you have to make choices and have priorities and do things in the right order. For exemple trade route districts are usually a priority over anything else (in most cases). If you're Germany it's different... Also we have limited space to build districts and to do so we have to destroy a tile, sometimes it's not worth it. If you're playing the Maoris (extreme exemple) choping forrests to build mines doesn't make sens and you probably don't want to destroy a +2+3+2+2 tile for pretty much any district.